HISTORY OF THE CAMP

Human rights defenders proved to be an unresolvable problem for the Mordovian camps. Vladimir Bukovsky wrote: “Living alongside the camps for so long left its mark on local residents. Several generations of them worked as wardens, and the job was handed down from father to son. They came to see the camps as a source of income… Over time the commercial relations between prisoners and wardens went so far that it became possible to buy literally anything with money. Protests, statements, reports of hunger strikes and abuse were sent into the outside world. In 1970 we even received a tape recording of Ginzburg’s speech (“And the wind returns…”) This was a report by Alexander Ginzburg, who was serving his second sentence in Mordovian political camps. He made a report on a tape recorder which one officer had brought to the camp to be repairs. The tape recorder did not have a microphone, but camp inmates found a way to record the report through the speaker.

Alexander Ginzburg. Dissident and political prisoner

Information from the camp spread by samizdat was sent abroad and created unwanted problems for the regime that was “fighting for peace and justice around the world”. It was impossible to stop these reports by repressions against the prisoners, or against the guards and employees of the camps.

There was one solution – to isolate the most active prisoners into other specially guarded camps. Two colonies were chosen in the Perm Oblast: corrective labor camp UT-389/6 for employees of law-enforcement bodies serving sentences and the recently remodeled and improved corrective labor camp UT-389/35 for young offenders. Perhaps they were chosen because the first was one of the most heavily guarded camps in the country, and the second camp was one of the best equipped, where if necessary even foreign representatives could visit. Furthermore, both colonies, unlike the Mordovian camps, were quite remote from Moscow, and at the same time they were in the European part of the country.

Decree by the head of the Perm Oblast UMVD to found ITK UT 389/35 and UT 389/36

On 9 June 1972, from the Mordovian camps ZHKH-385/3, ZHKH-385/17 and ZHKH 385/19 430 prisoners were transported in one convoy: 198 to the Perm camp UT-389/35 and 232 to UT-389/36. They became popularly known as Perm-35 and Perm-36.

In this convoy there were 180 prisoners sentenced on charges of nationalism, of whom 99 were serving a sentence of 25 years: 102 went sent to Perm-35 and 78 to Perm-36. 81 prisoners were sentenced on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, of whom 30 went sent to the camp Perm-35 and 51 to Perm-36; of 49 collaborators 21 went to Perm-35 and 28 to Perm-36; 25 prisoners sentenced for attempting to flee the USSR: 10 to Perm-35 and 15 to Perm-36. It was not possible to establish the charges for 83 prisoners; two were sentenced on charges of espionage, one of whom was the renowned Latvian dissident G. Astra, and the second a worker who stole a nuclear reactor rod to sell, and another 20 prisoners mainly serving sentences of 25 years – under other articles of the 1926 criminal code.

Photographs of the Perm-36 camp taken secretly by Ivan Kovalyov, who came to visit his father, human rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov

Photographs of the Perm-36 camp taken secretly by Ivan Kovalyov, who came to visit his father, human rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov

Photographs of the Perm-36 camp taken secretly by Ivan Kovalyov, who came to visit his father, human rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov

The convoy was top secret: the wagons with the prisoners, resembling ordinary postal and baggage wagons, were alternated with freight wagons, platforms and cisterns. The convoy prisoners were dressed in knitted tracksuits. The train only travelled at night, and during the day it stayed motionless at remote semi-stations. It took over 4 days to travel a distance of 1,000 kilometers and arrived in the Perm Oblast on 13 July 1972.

Wagonzak – wagon for transporting prisoners

This wagon for a special contingent was built in 1969. Exhibit of the Western Siberian Railroad Museum

Three years later, another completely new camp was added to the two Perm political camps, Perm-37. They were all subordinate to a new department located in the village of Skalny, which received the code VS-389, and the camps were officially designated as ITK VS-389/35, VS-389/36 and VS-389/37.

Plaque from the staff headquarters of the Perm-36 camp

Ink stamp of the Perm-36 camp. 1972

The first camps in Mordovia, such as VISHLON in the Perm Krai, appeared before the GULAG came into being. They were formed because of Moscow’s urgent need for logs. The city was mainly heated by stoves, and logs for them were purchased at special log markets. The shutdown of the New Economic Plan and the ban on free trade destroyed these markets. The responsibility for providing the capital with logs was placed on the OGPU, and the nearest large tracts of forest were found in Mordovia. Near the town of Temnikov, the department of the SEVLON was opened – the Northern Camp of Special Purpose of the OGPU, with the center in Ust-Sysolsk, present-day Syktyvkar, which in 1931 was transformed into the independent Temnikov corrective labor camp.

In 1948, part of the camp sections of the Temnikov corrective labor camp was transformed into Special Camp No. 3 “Dubravny” (Oak Grove), and in the early 1960s, all particularly dangerous criminals were concentrated in ITK ZHKH-385 – the former Dubravny camp.

Temnikov Corrective Labor Camp (“Temlag”)

One of the camp sections of the Dubravny special camp

In the early 1960s, there were 19 corrective labor colonies operating at the ZHKH-385 department – former camp sections of the Dubravny corrective labor camp, retaining the previous numeration. Criminals sentenced for particularly dangerous crimes against the state were held in five of them: at ZHKH-385/3 in the village of Barashevo with two sections and with a central camp hospital, ZHKH-385/7 in the village of Sosnovka with two sections, ZHKH-385/11 in the village of Yavas, ZKKH-385/17 in the village of Ozerny with two sections, one of which – No. 2 – was for women, and ZHKH-385/19 in the village of Lesnoi. Initially, prisoners were allocated according to their charges – different colonies had anti-Soviet, nationalist and collaborator prisoners.

Anatoly Marchenko. Prisoner of Mordovian political camps in 1961-1966

But the situation had changed significantly by the mid-1960s. The majority of anti-Soviet prisoners sentenced in 1957-1969 were released, and their total number decreased considerably, but staunch opponents of the communist regime began to be sent there – those who were later called dissidents. Many of them were members of various groups that were declared to be anti-Soviet – left-wing and right-wing socialist, nationalist, religious and even anarchist and monarchist groups. There were many anti-Soviet and anti-Communist prisoners charged with treason for attempting to flee the USSR.

“My Testimony” by A. Marchenko. First published in Samizdat in 1967, and according to historian A. Daniel “it had the effect of an exploding bomb”

In the second half of the 1960s, the first human rights defenders appeared in the camps. They continued to do what they had done at liberty – to fight for human rights, in this case, for the rights of prisoners. The individual struggle of prisoners for their rights did exist before this, and there were cases of fierce collective struggle (a vivid example, with certain reservations, was the uprising in the special camps in 1953-1954), but in the second half of the 1960s in Mordovian political camps, human rights activity became increasingly systematic in nature. Dissidents began to collect information about abuse by camp administration and the struggle of prisoners for their rights, and send this information out into the wider world. The first issue of the human rights bulletin “Chronicle of current events” of 30 April 1968 contained a report about a collective hunger strike in camp point 17 against unlawful deprivations of meetings and confiscations of documents.

The definition “crimes against the state” in the first criminal code of the RSFSR of 122 included “counter-revolutionary crimes” and “crimes against the state order”. Starting with the RSFSR criminal code of 1926, and also the criminal codes of all Soviet republics, the section of counter-revolutionary crimes was constantly expanded with new articles. This continued until the Law of the USSR was passed in December 1958 “On criminal liability for crimes against the state”, which listed a total of 14 crimes from treason to counter-revolutionary sabotage.

Criminal Code of the RSFSR for 1922

Criminal Code of the RSFSR for 1926 (1938 edition)

In 1948, preparing for a drastic escalation in international tension as the USSR blockaded West Berlin, Stalin ordered to single out prisoners who were particularly dangerous, as disturbances in camps increased. This category of prisoners was transferred to the so-called Special Camps with maximum security and special guards. Prisoners in these camps were used for the hardest menial tasks and wore white rectangular patches on their hats, coats and on the right knee of their pants.

Prisoners of special camps (film still)

The USSR law “On criminal liability for state crimes” of 1958 introduced the definition of “Particularly dangerous crimes against the state” into official jurisprudence. It included ten articles: “Treason”, “Espionage”, “Terrorist act”, “Terrorist act against representative of foreign nation”, “Diversion”, “Sabotage”, “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”, “War propaganda”, “Organized activity directed towards committing particularly dangerous crimes against the state, and participation in an anti-Soviet organization” and “Particularly dangerous crimes against the state committed against another nation of workers”. In the early 1960s, all of these articles were included in the new criminal codes of all the Soviet republics.

Prisoner of special camp No. 4 “Steppe”, author of the book “The Gulag Archipelago” Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Staged photo

Law of the USSR “On criminal liability for crimes against the state”, 1958

In the early 1960s, all prisoners sentenced on charges of particularly dangerous crimes against the state were gathered together in one place – the Mordovian Camps, where they were held in special zones separately from prisoners sentenced for other crimes. Later, this containment in separate camps was given a legislative basis.

The largest groups of particularly dangerous criminals in the early 1960s were sentenced on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda. The 20th congress and the small amount of truth about Stalin and the GULAG in Khrushchev’s speech gave rise to unjustified hopes for freedom of expression, as a result of which in 1957-1959 over 400,000 people were sentenced on these charges – including so-called “nationalists” sentenced on charges of fighting for post-war national liberation, primarily in Western Ukraine and Lithuania. The third largest group were collaborators – primarily village and town police officers who worked under the Nazi occupation.

ITK-6 from 1953 to the beginning of the 60s

The Gulag began to shrink the very next day after the official date of Stalin’s death. On March 6, 1953, an order was signed to stop the three largest constructions of the Gulag – a transpolar railway line from the Barents Sea to the Sea of \u200b\u200bOkhotsk and Chukotka, nicknamed the “Dead Road”, a tunnel under the Tatar Strait from Cape Lazarev on the mainland to Cape Pogibi on Sakhalin and the Great Turkestan Canal from the Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea; and on 27 March an amnesty was declared, releasing over a million prisoners. A large number of colonies and camp departments were liquidated in the shortest possible time; liquidated camp zones were abandoned, and where it was not possible to take them out in a short time – along with equipment and materials.

Steam locomotive on the Dead Road

But LO-6 was not abandoned. Already in the autumn of the same 1953, a new contingent appeared in it – convicted law enforcement officers: former employees of the Ministry of State Security, the prosecutor’s office, the police and the camp administration, accused of falsifying cases and other professional abuses. On July 1, 1954, there were already 469 of them. We do not know the personal composition of the prisoners of that period, its archives are completely inaccessible, but according to individual remarks in the protocols of party meetings that mentioned colonels and generals among the prisoners, as well as special procedures in the colony at that time, we can assume that these were mainly middle-level leaders camps, courts, prosecutors and police, which fell under the purge after the arrest and execution of Beria. The camp was popularly called “Cop Zone”.

Camp leaders. From the State Archive of the Russian Federation

These were the special rules. When in 1961 a television center began to function in Perm, one of the first televisions in the area appeared in the camp club, for which an unusually high mast with an antenna was installed that received a signal from Perm at a distance of 80 km. In the same year, prisoners were shown 18 films in two months, including 9 foreign films, while ordinary prisoners were allowed 2-3 films a month. Some prisoners were granted personal visits more frequently than was instructed. Prisoners were allowed to visit the village club outside the camp, and on weekends they were given leave as a reward.

In 1956, the prisoners refused dinner, because instead of the traditional pink salmon, cod was prepared for them. After the camp uprisings and mutinies of 1953-1954, which usually began with such private conflicts, such collective protests by prisoners were immediately reported to Moscow. Cod was removed from the ration and the employee who allowed it was punished.

Escort of prisoners. From the State Archive of the Russian Federation

Hard work at the logging site was replaced by timber processing, for which a large workshop with a set of woodworking machines and a sawmill was built half a kilometer from the camp, on the territory of a former rafting ground. However, refusals to work and cases of disobedience were almost a common practice. The camp commanders had the rank of senior lieutenant or captain, and among the prisoners were not only former colonels, but even generals. The internal discipline of this period is most clearly characterized by the officially recorded fact that the prisoners beat the head of the camp.

Logging shop, in 1980-1987 converted into a special regime barrack

On December 8, 1958, the Regulations on Correctional Labor Colonies and Prisons were adopted, according to which all camps began to be called colonies. Moreover, the very word “camp” began to become obsolete, it was officially banned from use in the press. LO No. 6 again became ITK-6. But this replacement did not take root among the people, and in everyday life the camps were still called camps.

ITK UT-389/6 from the early 1960s to 1972

In the early 60s. in all the republics of the USSR, new criminal codes came into force, and amendments were made to the existing corrective labor codes and internal regulations, which unified the activities of all correctional labor institutions in the country. By this time, almost all the prisoners, the former big bosses, left ITK-6 in one way or another, and its contingent was gradually renewed again. Most of it was made up of privates or ranks of the junior and middle commanding staff of law enforcement agencies, convicted of ordinary criminal offenses: theft, bribery, bodily harm, murder. There were many police drivers among them – the perpetrators of traffic accidents with victims, etc.

ITK-6 became known as ITK UT-389/6, where the cipher UT-389 denoted the Perm Department of Correctional Labor Institutions (UITU). The camp buildings practically did not change, only the old barracks were periodically repaired, and a department for bedridden patients with ten beds was attached to the first-aid post. This whole building, which was called from that time the medical unit, was sheathed with a herringbone tare board, the repaired watch in the transition between the living and working areas, which was called from that time the “room for searches”, was sheathed with the same “herringbone”. There were flower beds in the camp.

Medical unit. 1994 (before restoration)

At the same time, much attention was paid to the system of security fences – among the prisoners there were many young, trained men who, in addition, knew well the construction of conventional fencing systems, the orders and rules of security, and therefore were especially dangerous in the event of an escape. Therefore, these systems were constantly improved: plowed control and trail strips, wide restricted areas, shot from towers, and signaling systems appeared.

Fencing system ITK-6 in 1972

For the same security reasons, there was no logging site in the camp: the camp could not provide sufficient and reliable convoy for the forest plots. Logging was carried out by prisoners from two forest areas, probably ordinary criminal prisoners. And although another production zone with a timber workshop and a sawmill was organized away from the camp, there was not enough work for all the prisoners and this was a big problem for the camp administration.

The numbers 7-07-72 on one of the concrete paths – the date of its casting

At the beginning of the summer of 1972, an unexpected order was received – to transfer the entire special contingent to the colonies for convicted law enforcement officers of Nizhny Tagil and the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and to prepare ITK-6 to receive a new contingent.

In ITK-6, one of the four barracks built in 1946 was demolished and a brick headquarters building with a camp club was built in its place, and next to it was a common brick unheated toilet (previous prisoners used the toilets in the barracks). In addition, concrete paths were recast and camp fences reinforced. In July, the camp was ready to receive a new contingent…

Toilet in the living area. Above the doors: “1972” – the date of its construction